A very good Sunday to everyone! Hope your weekend’s filled with great activities and get ready for Monday Blues! 🙂 For today’s post, I would like to write about dropshipping, yet another way for you to earn some money without having a single physical product. What is dropshipping? According to Shopify:
Dropshipping is a retail fulfillment method where a store doesn’t keep the products it sells in stock. Instead, when a store sells a product, it purchases the item from a third party and has it shipped directly to the customer. As a result, the merchant never sees or handles the product.
There are many companies out there offer dropship service in order to boost their sales. The one that I am going to review right now is Kumoten.com in which I have tried for more than six months as the time of this writing.
Why did I choose Kumoten?
Free
Some companies out there charge a sum of money to their dropshippers in order to participate in their programme. I am trying to cut down every possible cost that I might spend during the whole time of doing dropshipping business
Integration to most popular e-commerce platforms in Malaysia
Since, I am a Malaysian targeting Malaysian customers, Kumoten is my real deal. I do not want some strangers messaging me in languages that I do not know how to converse. Currently their one-click sync is DOPE!
Loads of Products
There are more than ten thousand products you can choose to promote.
Free Shipping
They just updated their cost of shipping for all products to free and this was just recently. Before this, a single small and light product would cost RM9 – RM11 depending on the delivery address or location.
These four advantages are good enough to beat other companies, at the time I signed up to their dropship programme. So, how am I going so far for the first six months?
Take a look on the statistics above. I have received 33 successful orders amounting to RM2,423.26. Average in a month is RM400 and six orders. Please be reminded I only integrated and synced the products to Shopee only (I have removed the synced products out of shopee). Pretty sad, right. And my total sales in Shopee is RM2,532,47. I only manage to fork out RM109.21 for six months. Profiting about RM20 per month.
Why I did not profit much?
Low Profit Margin of Top Sale
There is one item that I sell in Shopee which is Gravity Spray Gun is my top sale. I am only profiting about RM0.90 per item. For a regular price, I can make RM3 (if I am not mistaken). In order to get a sale you have to make regular discounts to your products be reminded you are competing with if not tens, hundreds of dropshippers selling the exact same items with the same price. The only winning criteria here is lowest price!. If you have a series of good reviews on that item, it is also useful and good selling point.
Lack of promotion (Out of Kumoten.com control)
But it is worth mentioning. Yes, this also could be one of the main reasons. I do have a shop at Shopee, but I never promoted it out to social networks, blogs or any paid advertising. I am just crossing my fingers hoping for luck.
I believe if you promote your shop in any way possible, your sales will be increased tremendously. There’s no business is successful without hard work, am I right?
Talking most on their pros, let’s divert into their cons. Again there is no systems or businesses that are so perfect.
Lack of Support Channel
The only way to contact them now (the time of writing) is Facebook messenger if you face difficulties or issues your are having with your sales, orders etc. You will have to wait approximately 2 hours for them to reply.
Support Follow Up
Their follow up support to settle some unresolved issues is not that great. I have two unresolved issues from a month ago and yet still don’t have any feedback. The second time I follow up, they keep on asking what is my order number. They do not bother to scroll or reading my thread messeges. (Update: The issues have been resolved)
Most products are from China, Low products from Malaysia
There is nothing wrong with China’s products. The shipping time or duration that matters. Personally, I would pay higher prices for a product if it can be delivered 2 – 3 days. China’s products are delivered the fastest is 7 working days and can be up to 14 working days.
Competitors
This is not just Kumoten, but to all of Dropship service providers. Imagine competing with thousands of dropshippers selling the same items and products. You just have to be different and prominent from others.
To prove the cons that I have wrote above, please try it yourself. I just think that this is the most honest review of Kumoten dropshipping programme there is.
Thank you, I really needed this. So I also started dropshipping products using Kumoten as my supplier to shopee. So far so good with the promotions since I frequently promote in social media via Instagram and Whatsapp. However, I was too late as I have just read the reviews from other dropshipper users’ reviews when using Kumoten. They all agree with how the supplier charges high and customer service is poor.
I had my very first order from a customer, I only profited RM23. However, it seems not worth it as I have to topup credit around RM50. 🙁
Hi, Athena! Thanks for sharing your experience here. I think maybe it is time that Kumoten start to value promoters like us. Without us, they won’t get more profit. At least improve the customer service.
Regarding your first order, nothing much I can say. But you need to leverage on that order, make sure the buyer leave a very high rating and review to attract more buyers in future. At the beginning, you will always losing money for marketing.
Are you sure Komuten is not a scam? I placed 2 orders and my account get suspended. The first order did not deliver after 3 weeks, tracking number not valid.
Hi there, I’m so sorry to hear ur unpleasant experience with Komuten. I am in no authority to verify that some businesses are scam or not. As for my personal experience with komuten, I believe 95% of my orders are fulfilled with no issues. That was before I cancelled my account with them and they transfer back the remaining credit to my bank account. What I can suggest you is to contact them at their Facebook page via messenger. That’s the medium I used to settle my dispute with them. Let me know if this helps.
many other competitor can sell the same item i found on kumoten with a much lower price tag. For example, usb fan mine RM35 vs them RM24. If i sell 24, i lost almost RM2 when the initial price is around RM25+ in Kumoten. How is this possible? Are they using different and better dropship platform?